Chicken soup

A hot chicken broth or chicken soup will help you get back on your feet quickly if you have a cold or the flu. It is also good if you are exhausted or if the weather outside makes you freeze. Chicken broths are said to have an anti-inflammatory effect and can therefore help heal respiratory tract infections in particular. The hot steam from the soup and all the liquid will also do you a world of good. When we recently caught a Covid infection, the first thing we did was make chicken soup. Here we show you how to do it:

You need a good, fresh organic chicken and vegetables. We recommend carrots, celeriac, celery, onions, leeks, ginger, garlic and parsley, but you can use any root vegetables you like. If you want to make soup, use the best chicken you can get. What is sold as soup chicken is often really only to be used for a broth. We want to use as much as possible and of course eat the chicken in the soup. So invest in your most important ingredient.

Now prepare the chicken. To do this, wash it inside and out and then dry it with kitchen paper. Take care not to put it anywhere in the kitchen in its raw state where other ingredients are to be cut. Raw chicken meat can contain salmonella, which we don’t want to spread in the kitchen. We therefore simply put the chicken on a large soup plate after washing it. Now we remove the rump with a sharp knife. The rump is a fat gland on the chicken’s tail. It can give the soup a rancid taste, which we are not very keen on.

Now chop one or two onions into large pieces. The onion skin gives the soup a wonderful golden color and should definitely be cooked with the soup. You can dry roast the onions in the pan, which will also deepen the flavor of the soup thanks to the roasted aromas. Take the largest pot you have in the kitchen, ideally it should hold about 4 – 5 liters. The ingredients need a lot of space and you want to cook a good amount of soup, the recipe here makes about 2.5 – 3 liters. What you don’t want to eat straight away can be frozen in portions.

You can peel the ginger or simply cut it into slices. We recommend putting it in a container with the spices, which you can remove from the soup at any time if you find that the seasoning is otherwise too intense. The soup will cook on the stove for a long time, so otherwise it will be difficult to achieve the desired flavor. You can use a spice ball for this, but a tea bag also works well.

We also recommend bay leaf, peppercorns and thyme as spices. You can also make a more Asian tasting soup with some star anise, white pepper, a cinnamon stick and a few cardamom cloves. The only important thing is not to use salt at this point. The flavor of the ingredients will only be fully transfered into the soup if salt in the liquid does not prevent this (osmosis). For all broths, therefore, salt should be added only at the very end.

You only need to roughly clean the vegetables and cut them into larger pieces.

Add the chopped vegetables and chicken to the pan and top up with water. You don’t need any fat, the chicken contains enough. Add the spices so that you can take them out again at any time. A few dried shiitake mushrooms add umami. Then pour in 3.5 liters of cold water and slowly bring to the boil over a medium heat.

Now cook the soup over a medium heat for 2 ½ hours. Make sure that it only simmers very gently and never boils strongly. After about an hour, you can taste for the first time to see if the ginger and thyme are too dominant. If this is the case, simply remove the spices.

The broth is now golden and very aromatic. It contains an enormous amount of flavor without the use of a single gram of salt. First, carefully remove the chicken. It will probably fall apart into a few pieces, but this is not a problem. Set the chicken pieces aside on a plate to cool.

Now pour the stock through a sieve.

It’s best to use a pointed sieve so that you can squeeze out every last bit of flavor with a ladle. However, you can also use a simple pasta strainer. The vegetables are now completely overcooked and have released all their flavor into the soup.

When the chicken has cooled down, you can separate the meat from the bones and cut or pluck it into small pieces.

Only when you prepare a portion for serving, with vegetables and meat or other garnishes, is salt added to taste. This allows you to prepare very different variations. You can also use soy sauce if you have opted for an Asian flavor.

Small soup noodles, which can be quickly cooked in the broth, are also a good addition..

Refrigerate or freeze the part of the soup that you want to keep for later.

Enjoy.

And may the taste be with you.

Ingredients (for 4 people):

(Makes approx. 2.5 – 3 liters of chicken soup)

1 organic chicken (approx. 1.5 kg)

2 large brown onions

1 leek

2 celery stalks

3 carrots

150 g celeriac or parsnip

1 bunch of parsley

3 cloves of garlic

2 cm ginger

1 bay leaf

2 – 3 dried shiitake mushrooms

1 tsp peppercorns

1 bunch thyme

Salt and/or soy sauce to taste